Networking Simulation for Intelligent Transportation Systems

High Mobile Wireless Nodes

Benoit Hilt, Marion Berbineau, Alexey Vinel, Alain Pirovano, Benoit Hilt, Marion Berbineau, Alexey Vinel, Alain Pirovano

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781848218536
• eBook ISBN: 9781119407454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This book studies the simulation of wireless networking in the domain of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) involving aircraft, railway and vehicular communication. On this subject, particular focus is placed on effective communication channels, mobility modeling, multi-technology simulation and global ITS simulation frameworks.

Networking Simulation for Intelligent Transportation Systems addresses the mixing of IEEE802.11p and LTE into a dedicated simulation environment as well as the links between ITS and IoT; aeronautical mobility and VHD Data Link (VDL) simulation; virtual co-simulation for railway communication and control-command; realistic channel simulation, mobility modeling and autonomic simulation for VANET and quality metrics for VANET.

The authors intend for this book to be as useful as possible to the reader as they provide examples of methods and tools for running realistic and reliable simulations in the domain of communications for ITS.

1
Simulation of Convergent Networks for Intelligent Transport Systems with VSimRTI

1.1. Introduction

For the realization of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), ad hoc networks based on IEEE 802.11p have a long history in research. This technology envisions a decentralized information exchange between mobile vehicles, and also with stationary roadside stations to enable communication with central stations in the public data network (i.e. the Internet). This approach offers several advantages such as the direct exploitation of the broadcast characteristics of the radio channel, which is useful for short message broadcasting in the vehicle’s vicinity. However, scalability is a big challenge in this approach, due to a limited communication range and a lack of deterministic quality of service (QoS). With the new generations of cellular networks (mobile phone networks), these drawbacks of vehicular ad hoc networks could be overcome. Cellular networks, e.g. 5G, are emerging as a capable solution not only for mobile Internet services, but also for ITS-specific traffic safety and efficiency matters. Cellular networks exhibit the major advantage of a nearly unlimited communication range, due to their architecture, with only a short wireless part between the mobile device and the base station, and the wired part through the backbone. However, this architecture introduces a particular delay overhead, which makes meeting the strong requirements of many safety applications questionable. A solution could be an intelligent combination of vehicular ad hoc networks and cellular networks to link the advantages of both approaches.

The multi-aspect simulation environment VSimRTI [SCH 11] is a comprehensive framework that connects various simulation tools together to cover all aspects needed for a proper evaluation of new cooperative mobility solutions for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Vehicle movements and sophisticated communication technologies can be modeled in detail. VSimRTI couples different simulators to allow for the simulation of various aspects of future ITS. In the following sections, we describe how we have extended the VSimRTI architecture to enable the simulation of cellular networks. Consequently, we have developed the novel cellular communication simulator VSimRTI_Cell that introduces a grade of abstraction of cellular networks. The developed simulation tool is lightweight and fast enough for larger scale scenarios. However, particularly from the vehicular application perspective, the simulator models important features which are not considered in other related frameworks [PRO 14a, PRO 14b]. Moreover, the new extended VSimRTI architecture not only allows for the analysis of vehicle networks based on cellular communication, but also novel hybrid solutions that combine ad hoc and cellular communication in an intelligent way.

This chapter is structured as follows. In section 1.2, we resume the fundamentals of the system of cooperative vehicles, such as message types, application categories and the specific concept of facilities. Then, section 1.4 introduces the new cellular simulator VSimRTI_Cell in closer detail. In section 1.5, we perform a short simulation study on generic safety and efficiency applications to present the individual advantages of ad hoc and cellular communication as well as a hybrid approach in converging networks in the context of ITS. Finally, section 1.6 concludes this chapter.

1.2. Fundamentals of cooperative ITS

1.2.1. Message types

The information exchange in ad hoc networks among vehicles, and among vehicles and infrastructure units is standardized to guarantee interoperability. The two most important message types are the Cooperative Awareness Message (CAM) [ETS 14a] and the Decentralized Environmental Notification Message (DENM) [ETS 14b].

Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) are distributed within the ad hoc network, and provide information of presence, position and the basic status of a vehicle to neighboring vehicles that are located within a single-hop distance. Vehicles generate, send and receive CAMs, as long as they participate in the ad hoc network. By receiving CAMs, vehicles are aware of other vehicles in their vicinity and are informed about their positions, movements, basic attributes and basic sensor information. CAMs are generated and sent by a vehicle periodically.

Decentralized Environmental Notification Messages (DENMs) are used to alert road users to a detected dangerous situation, e.g. a hazardous location, roadworks or a risk of collision with another vehicle. In general, the processing procedure of sending a DENM is as follows: after the detection of a dangerous event, the vehicle immediately broadcasts a DENM to other vehicles which are concerned by the event and are located within the same geographical area. The transmission of the DENM is repeated with a certain frequency and persists as long as the event is present. According to the type of event detected, the DENM is relayed by other vehicles. The termination of the repeated DENM broadcasting is either achieved automatically once the event disappears, after a predefined expiry time, or by a vehicle that generates a special DENM to communicate that the event has disappeared. A vehicle, which receives a DENM, processes the information and, if the information in the DENM is relevant for the driver, it presents an appropriate warning or information on the vehicle’s HMI (Human Machine Interface).

1.2.2. Application categories

Enhancing vehicle safety and improving traffic efficiency are the two most important aims of vehicular networks. Moreover, communication capabilities in vehicles also allows popular digital services to be provided to the users. The ETSI [ETS 09, ETS 10] and the Car2Car Communication Consortium Manifesto [CAR 07] define several scenarios and use cases for these objectives. The following section gives a brief overview of how vehicular networks are used to share information to advance vehicle safety, increase traffic efficiency or enable comfort applications.

1.2.2.1. Traffic safety applications

Vehicular safety applications are characterized, in general, by vehicular communication which is used to mitigate the occurrence of dangerous situations and accidents. Applications, installed in a vehicle, monitor the vehicle’s state and the activities of the driver. Relevant pieces of information are transmitted after a relevance check to vehicles in the vicinity. For example, information about the position and speed of a vehicle via CAM or about dangerous locations on the roadway is transmit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• 1 Simulation of Convergent Networks for Intelligent Transport Systems with VSimRTI
• 2 Near-field Wireless Communications and their Role in Next Generation Transport Infrastructures: an Overview of Modelling Techniques
• 3 Trace Extraction for Mobility in Civil Aeronautical Communication Networks Simulation
• 4 Air-Ground Data Link Communications in Air Transport
• 5 A Virtual Laboratory as an Assessment Tool for Wireless Technologies in Railway Systems
• 6 Emulating a Realistic VANET Channel in Ns-3
• 7 CONVAS: Connected Vehicle Assessment System for Realistic Co-simulation of Traffic and Communications
• 8 Highway Road Traffic Modeling for ITS Simulation
• 9 F-ETX: A Metric Designed for Vehicular Networks
• 10 Autonomic Computing and VANETs: Simulation of a QoS-based Communication Model
• List of Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement